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The Anthropology and the Environment Committee of the RAI have put together a list of anthropologists who are interested in environmental issues. This list is a resource for other anthropologists and for those outside anthropology looking for a particular expertise.

Statement of interest: I am currently conducting my PhD research on emic perspectives on forest and land fire issues of local communities in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. I am having a natural science background, but shifted my focus on social ecological issues.

Statement of interest: The project I am currently developing concerns the social life of ice in the Arctic and, specifically, in the country of Iceland. Following my work on renewable energy transitions—which has analyzed the role of “mitigation” strategies in forestalling further anthropogenic harms to the earth’s aqua-, litho-, bio- and atmospheres, this project centers on “adaptations” to climate change. Ice has clearly become our climatological canary. It can be measured, its retreats photographed, its historic depths plumbed and its duration—or life span—calculated. And it is melting: nowhere faster, and faster than expected, in the Arctic region. Ice’s physical changes and the geohydrological implications associated with it are now featured regularly in the media, especially as displacements increase and permafrost withers. However, scant attention has been given to the social and cultural meaning of changing ice formations in the frozen places where it has dominated landscapes, shaped lives and conditioned accounts of land, weather and subjective experience. This project prioritizes the social and political significance of ice, the values associated with it, and the implications of its expiration; it is an inquiry into the social sentiments and consequences of melt and the metamorphosis of ice. In the simplest terms it is a study of cryohmuan relations.

My second book Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (forthcoming 2017) is based on a collaborative research project (with Dominic Boyer) in Oaxaca, Mexico and focuses on the political and social contingencies of renewable energy development. Home to some of the best wind on the planet, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec has been the locus for a booming wind energy industry. While wind park development across the Isthmus has been animated by state and corporate initiatives that purport to enhance regional economic development, generate a green profile for the Mexican state and suspend, to a degree, a quantity of carbon dioxide contamination, local resistance to projects has been significant and is deeply conditioned by histories of state abandonment and suspicions regarding transnational capital. Conflicts surrounding renewable energy transitions are, on the one hand, deeply political economic in nature, concerning dispossession and persistent inequalities. But they are also summarily ethical projects that hold out a promise for a greater global good, while often demanding localized concessions. The book chapters are structured to oscillate between an emphasis on material entitles and other lives (Wind, Trucks, Species) and the human intraconnections within and among them. In this project and others, I am aiming to think through the ways in which ecological authority is constituted as well as how anthropogenic climate change calls for new ways of imagining our collective biotic and material futures.

Geographical/topical area of interest: My principal geographical area of interest is the circumpolar North. I’m also interested in cross-disciplinary perspectives from art, archaeology and architecture.

Statemen of interest: The emergence of global warming has been influenced by human behaviors, and unfortunately humans themselves are the ones who suffer most with this impact. One case of an outbreak of malaria in Africa occured due to shifting cultivation, forest openings, a proliferation of warm water, with direct impact on local climate, and indirect impact on health. The emergence of new breeding sites for Anopheles has become an early indication of malaria outbreaks. These risk behaviors have a systemic impact, and one of the goals I want to generate through my thesis is how to break the chain of risky human behavior patterns by establishing an early warning system of human behavior on how to treat nature. I will consider one method to practice local customs that once existed in the community regarding the environment, and to reestablish these local customs into formal norms. Hopefully, these norms would be better understood and applied by local communities as a form of controlling human behavior towards the nature around them.